The Magdalene Tiberius

The Magdalene Tiberius

A private collector returned this sculpture to Italy on January 19, 2017, after it emerged that the object was stolen in 1944 from a museum near Naples.

This portrait head of Emperor Tiberius was discovered during excavations in 1925-26 at the Roman theater of Sessa Aurunca in Campania. Once excavated, it was displayed with other statues from the same cryptoporticus in the Civic Museum of Sessa Aurunca.

However, the head was stolen in 1944, likely by French occupational forces, and is thought to have been in a private collection in Algeria for decades. It did not surface on the art market until March 2003, when it was put up for auction in Paris at the Hôtel Drouot consigned by Fernand Sintes, who inherited it from his Algerian family.

At the same auction, a piece with a similar provenance emerged –– the Head of Drusus, Tiberius’ son. It was stolen from the same Italian museum and bought by the Cleveland Museum of Art before being repatriated as a stolen object.

The Tiberius head was sold to the New York-based Royal-Athena Galleries, owned by Jerome Eisenberg, who then sold it to a private collector in 2004. Art historian John Pollini published the head in a 2005 article for Antike Kunst, where it became known as the Magdalene Tiberius, named after a member of the collector’s family.

However, two scholars, Giuseppe Scarpati in 2011 and Sergio Cascella in 2013, published articles on the two heads in Italian archaeological magazines, sharing, for the first time, some 1926 photographs that showed the heads when they were first discovered. Both scholars suggested that the heads were stolen from the Sessa Aurunca museum in 1944, and matched the heads to the two sold at auction.

The private collector relinquished the head to Italy in 2017, the same year that the Cleveland Museum of Art repatriated its head of Drusus.

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Sculpture – statues, carvings, bronzes, reliefs, figurines

Roman

Hôtel Drouot

Piasa

Fernand Sintes

Italy

Michela Herbert

Ilaria Bortot